Revealed: the 12 Queensland suburbs where crime is climbing fastest

Ask where Queensland’s crime problem lives and most people point to the same places: Fortitude Valley after dark, the Gold Coast strip, a regional town with a reputation. The data points somewhere else entirely — the new-build housing estates on the fringe of Brisbane, where the streets are barely finished and recorded offences are climbing faster than anywhere in the state.

Top of the list is Yarrabilba, a master-planned estate in the Logan growth corridor. In 2022 police recorded 471 offences there. By 2025 that had climbed to 936 — a 99% jump between 2022 and 2025, near enough to double. A few kilometres away Logan Reserve is close behind, up 93% (411 to 794).

There is an honest caveat to sit with these numbers — and it’s the whole reason the list looks the way it does: these are booming, master-planned suburbs. Yarrabilba and Logan Reserve were paddocks a decade ago and now house tens of thousands of people. More residents means more of everything — more homes, more vehicles, more of the activity police record. Part of the rise is simply more people, not necessarily a higher risk per household.

These are counts of recorded offences, not a rate per resident, so they can’t on their own tell you whether an individual’s risk has gone up. What they do show is police workload — and in these suburbs it has climbed steadily, year after year, without the one-off spike-and-settle you see elsewhere. Whether the rise outpaces population growth is the open question; that the raw numbers are rising is not.

Pull Yarrabilba apart and the growth is broad, not one bad category. The biggest single driver is the QPS ‘Other Theft’ category, up from 86 offences in 2022 to 269 in 2025, but break-ins, property damage and drug offences all rose alongside it. It’s the signature of a suburb filling up fast, not a single crime wave.

And it isn’t only Logan’s estates. The list reaches right across the state: the Sunshine Coast beach suburbs of Mooloolaba and Buddina, inner-Brisbane Toowong and regional towns from Cannonvale near Airlie Beach to Gatton in the Lockyer Valley. Beenleigh, already one of the busiest suburbs on the list, added more than a thousand offences a year to hit 2,970 in 2025.

A separate, low-base group climbs faster still — but starts from so few offences that a big percentage comes easily, which is why these sit outside the main ranking. Baringa on the Sunshine Coast is up 133% and Ripley near Ipswich 117%, both climbing from just a handful of offences in 2022 as their first residents moved in.

And where it’s falling

The same dataset runs the other way too. In a string of suburbs recorded offences didn’t climb — they dropped sharply over the same period. Leading the state is White Rock in Cairns, where offences fell from 843 in 2022 to 496 in 2025 — a 41% fall, the biggest of any suburb in Queensland. Established suburbs from Brisbane’s north to Townsville and the Sunshine Coast round out the list.

Find your suburb

Every Queensland suburb with at least 300 reported offences a year is in the table below — 376 in all. Search for yours, or click any column heading to rank the whole state — by the biggest rise, the most offences or A–Z. Tap any suburb to see its full crime, flood, bushfire and school picture.

Journalists and researchers: download the full dataset (CSV) — all 376 suburbs with annual totals for 2022–2025 and the percentage change. Free to use with attribution to KnowYourBlock and the Queensland Police Service.

Queensland’s crime frontier has moved to its building frontier. The fastest rises aren’t in the postcards you’d expect — they’re in the estates going up right now.

If you’re buying into one of these suburbs — and thousands of people are, every year — the number that matters is the local one. Check any Queensland address on KnowYourBlock and you’ll see the crime read for that street alongside its flood, bushfire, zoning and school-catchment picture — or open any suburb above to see how it compares.